ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for September 2023 is Carolina Sánchez.
Carolina Sánchez is a Colombian writer and researcher. She is one of the editors of the Latin American Platform of Environmental Humanities. She is also a Fulbright scholar and PhD candidate in Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies at Rutgers University. She works on political transitions in Contemporary Latin America, representations of spaces and belonging in visual narratives, poetics, and politics of space. She uses conceptual tools from Ecocriticism, Continental Philosophy, and Literature. She published the bilingual poetry book Viaje / Voyage translated into English by Ariel Francisco, based on the film Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky. Some of her academic works have been published or are forthcoming in the Routledge volume on Human Rights in Colombian Literature and Cultural Production, Tekoporá. Latin American Journal on Environmental Humanities and Territorial Studies, Escritos, Papel de Colgadura and ASAP/Journal (Hopkins Press).
How did you become interested in studying ecocriticism and/or the environmental humanities?
I have both a personal and an academic connection to the environmental humanities. My grandfather who was a philosopher and a human rights defender, besides working in universities, worked in the Colombian agrarian reform during the sixties (that is still not fulfilled and is a key point of the Colombian peace agreement from 2016). During this work he realized there were many contradictions and gaps between the scholarship he had learned and the complex process of environmental dispossession he was witnessing. I think the environmental humanities, with its intrinsic dialogues between different disciplines and local knowledges, attends some of these challenges. Besides, the complex climate crises and extractive processes of neoliberalism forces us to see the limits of our knowledge and redefine it from a non-expert perspective. Like in Philosophy, I feel that in the Environmental Humanities we are always learning and revisiting our thought.
The academic answer is that when I came to the US to do my PhD I took the seminars of Jorge Marcone, and he introduced me to the field in two ways: through the creative and public engagement that he develops his own research and by reading the fundamental texts of the field. At Rutgers, I have also been inspired by the community work of Marcy Schwartz and I find her works on popular culture and archive very instrumental to the environmental humanities, although she specializes in another field.
Who is your favorite environmental artist, writer, or filmmaker? Or what is your favorite environmental text? Why?
I think that is an answer that changes over time. But for the last couple of years, I have been following and studying the work of the Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza. From the perspective of authorship, I think her work is powerful, multilayered and innovative. In the last years she has published poetry, scholarship and novel-essays like There was a lot of Fog, Smoke, I am not sure what (2016), and Autobiography of Cotton (2020). In these last works, she incorporates images and archival documents from personal and official sources into narrations that blur the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. The books include travel stories of the narrator´s journeys in the same territories of her book´s characters with whom she shares different types of kindships. And in her workshops and books on writing she reflects on collaborative and communal writing processes, and I find these practices very productive and representative of the field. I am interested in particular in her book Autobiography of Cotton, where the author follows the footprints of her grandparents and other nomadic families who worked harvesting cotton on the northeastern border between Mexico and the United Stated during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This novel-archive tells the history of crops of cotton in the desert and asks about belonging and how we dwell the footprints of others. This fictional research of the archaeology of her own past and the material conditions that made her present possible allows me as a reader to ask questions on our present environmental problems that combine different scales, such as the personal, the geological and the political violences of the present.
What are you currently working on?
Currently, I am finishing my dissertation, which analyzes the ways in which Contemporary artistic works from Latin America contest global extractivism by envisioning new cultural and political kinships between human and non-human agents, such as animals, plants and rivers. The corpus of my research is made up of contemporary literary works and installations by women artists like Cristina Rivera Garza, Carolina Caycedo and Arabella Salaverry from Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica and Mexico. Based on indigenous and popular cultural traditions, I argue that novels, visual art, and intermedial works criticize the violent extraction of natural resources and produce imaginaries of care necessary for transitional justice in contexts of political violence.
For the last three years, I have been one of the editors of the Latin American Platform of Environmental Humanities. Working in this collective has been a very special experience. We have many virtual spaces for conversation on environmental arts, quotidian practices and scholarship in Latin America from interdisciplinary perspectives. The most constant spaces are the reading club “Thinking with the Plants” and the series of dialogues “Coffee in the Patio”. In the former we focus on environmental humanities and have interviewed researchers from Latin America, United States and Europe that focus on topics such as Amazonian contemporary thinking, the memory of rivers, technology and climate crises, Geo-writings, and the politization of the coca plant among many other topics. In Coffee in the Patio we interview visual artists, writers and other artists on how they collaborate and develop research on environmental problems. We record the conversations of both spaces, and we have a digital archive of the podcast on our page. Since we are a platform, we are interested in the visibility of the work of others, and with this purpose we have published dossiers and books in collaboration with other researchers. Some of these publications are more academic and others are more creative, such as A Cabinet for the Future, a collaborative book that tells the environmental and personal history of quotidian objects. Also, during this summer, we organized the conference To be Here in the Earth in the main Public Library of the city of Manizales, that also had the possibility of online attendance. In this moment, the group is composed by the writer and researcher Sofia Rosa, the visual artist Arturo Cerda and the researchers Alejandro Ponce de León, Santiago Eslava Bejarano and Santiago Alarcón. Collaborating with them and learning from their individual research and creative works has been among the most inspiring experiences I have had in the last years.
Also, next week is the launch of a series of zines intitled In the Mouth of the River. It is a collaboration with 15 authors that include writers and visual artists. We participated in a summer school in the University of Kassel, that was part of the Documenta Fifteen and was a collaboration with MAMA, CAPAZ and the DAAD. The theme was the discomforts generated by extractivisms and the zines are a memory of our discussions. At last, I am finishing a book that mixes short fiction and poetry and revolves on land problems, nature and childhood, mourning and memory. It is forthcoming with the independent Colombian press Corazón de lobo.
What is something you are reading right now (environmental humanities-related or otherwise) that inspires you, either personally or professionally? Comment briefly on why or how it inspires you.
I am reading a selection of literary texts by Latin American writers published by independent presses. Some of them that are translated into English are Forgotten Manuscript by Sergio Chejfec, Fresh Dirt from the Grave by Giovanna Rivero, published by Charco Press and Adjacent Islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado, published by Ugly Dunklin Press. I am really intrigued by the indefinable nature of the text by Chjefec that combines fiction and essay and his reflections on writing and its mediums. In the case of Rivero, I am enjoying her skillful fictions and how each short story comes back to the leitmotiv of earth from different perspectives. And, in the case of Delgado, I am interested in the quotidian nature of her poetry and her broad artistic project that includes writing poetry, doing artist-books, and printing in a risograph in her own workshop.
I am really inspired by the work independent small presses are doing in Latin America because they are printing beautifully crafted books, so there is an interest in the materiality and the visual and tactile nature of the books. But mainly I admire the high stakes they are carrying out: they are publishing new and young authors, are not afraid about publishing poetry and they are positioning key topics in the cultural agendas like gender and environmental humanities, as well as other social justice causes. And from an aesthetic perspective they are taking risks like publishing experimental books with mixed literary genres and in different formats. They also build solidarity and alternative cultural circuits that include libraries, librarians, and independent fairs.
To study these initiatives, I collaborated with a group of scholars from different universities from the New York and New Jersey areas. We founded the GESEI (Group of Study of Independent Presses) and we organized a four-day conference and book fair. We invited around 20 presses both from Latin America and the US and talked with them about gender, politics, the editing process, indigenous traditions of crafting books, sustainability, and the book industry among other topics. The question between the practices of independent presses and the field of environmental humanities is a very interesting one for which I have no exhaustive answer yet. But I want to leave the question here.
Is there a scholar in the field who inspires you? Why?
Yes, many. I am very interested in Latin American thought and I am inspired by the works of researchers and writers like Jorge Marcone, Marisol de la Cadena and the poet Dina Ananco. Besides what I mention above about Jorge Marcone´s engaged scholarship, his works on indigenous and popular environmentalisms and his emphasis on listening to the stakeholders has influenced my own research. Another aspect of his scholarship that has been important for me is his disposition to forge new collaborations in projects that involve arts, sciences and humanities, in the US and in Latina America, in particular with SARAS in Uruguay. In the case of Marisol de la Cadena, I admire her capacity of listening and dismantling her own analytical tools to perceive the agency of the Ausangate mountain which led to the foundations of her argument on the political agency of earth beings. I also find her writing and the ways in which she plays with words very inspiring. I recently read the works of Dina Ananco and also listened to her reflect on her own work and was amazed by her capacity of mixing irony, humor and critical thinking.
The work of Gisela Heffes has been key to my own research; in particular, I enjoy her book recently translated into English as Visualizing Loss in Latin America. In this book, Heffes positions and puts in conversation Latin American environmental thought with other traditions of environmental thinking, in particular from the anglosphere. In addition, the reflections of the Latin American city as an environment connected with other territories have opened new avenues of thought for me. I also find Heffes’s creative work really inspiring and the fact that she published both scholar and literary texts in books and other media.
In my country, there is a niche of environmental scholars who come from the city of Manizales which is surrounded by Andean mountains with tropical glaciers. From those thinkers, my research has been influenced by the concept of territory by Arturo Escobar, and the concept of environmental mourning by Mariana Matija. And also, I am inspired by scholars and writers who are open to experimentations. For example, in the last ASLE conference I had the opportunity to participate in an experimental panel, led by the generous poet Allison Cobb, that mixed creative writing, arts and scholarship.
